Joseph J. Ellis (32 page)

In retrospect, this was the proper and indeed the only realistic policy. But successful negotiations required a French government sufficiently stable and adequately impressed with American power to bargain seriously. Neither of these conditions was present during Adams’s term as president. Until the emergence of Napoleon as dictator, the French government, eventually called the Directory, was a misnamed coalition of ever-shifting political factions inherently incapable of either coherence or direction. What’s more, from the French perspective—and the same could be said about the English perspective, as well—the infant American republic was at most a minor distraction,
more often an utter irrelevancy, within the larger Anglo-French competition for primacy on the Continent. In short, at the international level, the fundamental conditions essential for resolving the central problem of the Adams presidency did not exist. The problem was inherently insoluble.
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On the other hand, and to make a bad situation even worse, the ongoing debate between Federalists and Republicans had degenerated into ideological warfare. Each side sincerely saw the other as traitors to the core principles of the American Revolution. The political consensus that had held together during Washington’s first term, and had then begun to fragment into Federalist and Republican camps over the Whiskey Rebellion and Jay’s Treaty, broke down completely in 1797. Jefferson spoke for many of the participants caught up in this intensely partisan and nearly scatological political culture when he described it as a fundamental loss of trust between former friends. “Men who have been intimate all their lives,” he observed, “cross the street to avoid meeting, and turn their heads another way, lest they should be obliged to touch hats.” He first used the phrase “a wall of separation,” which would later become famous as his description of the proper relation between church and state; here, however, describing the political and ideological division between Federalists and Republicans: “Politics and party hatreds destroy the happiness of every being here,” he reported to his daughter. “They seem, like salamanders, to consider fire as their element.”
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Jefferson’s interpretation of the escalating party warfare was richly ironic, since he had contributed to the breakdown of personal trust and the complete disavowal of bipartisan cooperation by rejecting Adams’s offer to renew the old partnership. But Jefferson was fairly typical in this regard, lamenting the chasm between long-standing colleagues while building up the barricades from his side of the divide. Federalists and Republicans alike accused their opponents of narrow-minded partisanship, never conceding or apparently even realizing that their own behavior also fit the party label they affixed to their enemies.

The very idea of a legitimate opposition did not yet exist in the political culture of the 1790s, and the evolution of political parties was proceeding in an environment that continued to regard the word
party
as an epithet. In effect, the leadership of the revolutionary generation lacked a vocabulary adequate to describe the politics they were inventing.
And the language they inherited framed the genuine political differences and divisions in terms that only exacerbated their nonnegotiable character. Much like Jefferson, Adams regarded the impasse as a breakdown of mutual trust: “You can witness for me,” he wrote to John Quincy concerning Jefferson’s opposition, “how loath I have been to give him up. It is with much reluctance that I am obliged to look upon him as a man whose mind is warped by prejudice.… However wise and scientific as a philosopher, as a politician he is a child and the dupe of the party.”
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At the domestic level, then, Adams inherited a supercharged political atmosphere every bit as ominous and intractable as the tangle on the international scene. It was a truly unprecedented situation in several senses: His vice president was in fact the leader of the opposition party; his cabinet was loyal to the memory of Washington, which several members regarded as embodied now in the person of Alexander Hamilton, who was officially retired from the government altogether; political parties were congealing into doctrinaire ideological camps, but neither side possessed the verbal or mental capacity to regard the other as anything but treasonable; and finally, the core conviction of the entire experiment in republican government—namely, that all domestic and foreign policies derived their authority from public opinion—conferred a novel level of influence to the press, which had yet to develop any established rules of conduct or standards for distinguishing rumors from reliable reporting. It was a recipe for political chaos that even the indomitable Washington would have been hard-pressed to control. No one else, including Adams, stood much of a chance at all.

If hindsight permits this realistic rendering of the historical conditions, which in turn defined the limited parameters within which the policies of the Adams presidency took shape, it also requires us to notice that none of the major players possessed the kind of clairvoyance required to comprehend what history had in store for them. (They believed they were making history, not the other way around.) In effect, the political institutions and the very authority of the federal government were too new and ill-formed to cope effectively with the foreign and domestic challenges facing the new nation.

What happened as a result was highly improvisational and deeply personal. Adams virtually ignored his cabinet, most of whom were
more loyal to Hamilton anyway, and fell back to his family for advice, which in practice made Abigail his unofficial one-woman staff. Jefferson resumed his partnership with Madison, the roles now reversed, with Jefferson assuming active command of the Republican opposition from the seat of government in Philadelphia and Madison dispensing his political wisdom from retirement at Montpelier. While the official center of the government remained in the executive and congressional offices at Philadelphia, the truly effective centers of power were located in two political partnerships based on personal trust. Having failed to revive the great collaboration of the revolutionary era, Adams and Jefferson went their separate ways with different intimates.

T
HERE WAS
an almost tribal character to the Adams collaboration. Adams himself, while vastly experienced as a statesman and diplomat, had no experience whatsoever as an executive. He had never served as a governor, as Jefferson had, or as a military commander, as Washington had. And he regarded the role of party leader of the Federalists as not just unbecoming but utterly incompatible with his responsibilities as president, which were to transcend party squabbles in the Washington mode and reach decisions like a “patriot king” whose sole concern was the long-term public interest. As a result, the notion that he was supposed to manage the political factions in the Congress or in his cabinet never even occurred to him. Instead, he would rely on his own judgment and on the advice of his family and trusted friends.

This explains two of his earliest and most controversial decisions. First, he insisted on including Elbridge Gerry in the peace delegations to France. Gerry was a kind of New England version of Benjamin Rush, a lovable gadfly with close personal ties to the Adams family but with ideological convictions that floated in unpredictable patterns over the entire political landscape. The most recent breezes had carried him into the Republican camp as a staunch defender of the French Revolution, which was the chief reason Abigail thought that Gerry “had a kink in his head.” Adams himself warned Gerry not to confuse what was happening in France with the American Revolution. “The French are no more capable of a republican government,” he insisted, “than a snowball can exist a whole week in the streets of Philadelphia under a
burning sun.” Despite Abigail’s reservations, Adams wanted Gerry on the peace delegation to demonstrate his bipartisan principles and also to assure that he would receive candid reports from a trusted friend.
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Second, he appointed John Quincy as American minister to Prussia. His son objected, protesting that the appointment would surely be criticized as an act of nepotism and would fuel charges that Adams was grooming an heir for the presidency: “Your reasons will not bear examination,” Adams retorted. “It is the worst founded opinion I ever knew you to conceive.” This was vintage Adams bravado, shouting his denial at political advice he knew to be sound, refusing to listen because it was patently political and merely self-protective. Mostly, he wanted John Quincy located in one of the diplomatic capitals of Europe as his own personal listening post. “I wish you to continue your practice of writing freely to me,” he wrote, then added, “and more cautiously to the office of state.” He would be his own secretary of state and trust his son’s quite impressive knowledge of European affairs more than official reports.
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Both of these decisions paid dividends the following year, when the prospects for an outright declaration of war against France looked virtually certain. The ever agile and forever unscrupulous Talleyrand, foreign minister of France, had refused to receive the American peace delegation and had then sent three of his operatives to demand a bribe of fifty thousand pounds sterling as the prerequisite for any further negotiations. When Adams received word of this outrageous ultimatum, he ordered the delegation to return home, but he also withheld the official dispatches describing the bribery scheme from the Congress and the public. Abigail described this decision as “a very painful thing” because “the President could not play his strongest card.” But Adams knew that popular reaction to what became known as the XYZ Affair (after the three French operatives) would be virulently patriotic and intensely belligerent. By delaying publication of the dispatches, he bought time. And during that time, Gerry, always the maverick, had opted to remain in Paris to confer unofficially with French diplomats about averting the looming war. His reports home counseled patience, based on the growing recognition within the Directory that the bribery demand had been a terrible miscalculation. John Quincy’s network of European sources also urged enlightened procrastination. Despite considerable
pressure from the Federalists in Congress and mounting war fever in the wake of the XYZ revelations, Adams held out hope for reconciliation based primarily on these reports.
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Abigail was his chief domestic minister without portfolio. In a very real sense Adams did not have a domestic policy, indeed believed that paying any attention to the shifting currents of popular opinion and the raging party battles in the press violated his proper posture as president, which was to remain oblivious to such swings in the national mood. Abigail tended to reinforce this belief in executive independence. Jefferson, she explained, was like a willow who bent with every political breeze. Her husband, on the other hand, was like an oak: “He may be torn up by the roots. He may break. But he will never bend.”
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Nevertheless, she followed the highly partisan exchanges in the Republican newspapers and provided her husband with regular reports on the machinations and accusations of the opposition. When an editorial in the
Aurora
described Adams as “old, guerelous
[sic]
, bald, blind, and crippled,” she joked that she alone possessed the intimate knowledge to testify about his physical condition. Popular reaction to the XYZ Affair generated a surge of hostility toward French supporters in America, and Abigail noted with pleasure the appearance of William Cobbett’s anti-Jefferson editorials in
Porcupine’s Gazette
, where Jefferson was described as head of “the frenchified faction in this country” and a leading member of “the American Directory.” She relished reporting the Fourth of July Toast: “John Adams. May he, like
Samson
, slay thousands of Frenchmen with the
jawbone
of Jefferson.” She passed along gossip circulating in the streets of Philadelphia about plans to mount pro-French demonstrations, allegedly orchestrated by “the grandest of all grand Villains, that traitor to his country—the infernal Scoundrel Jefferson.” She predicted that the Republican leaders “will … take ultimately a station in the public’s estimation like that of the Tories in our Revolution.”
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Although we can never know for sure, there is considerable evidence that Abigail played a decisive role in persuading Adams to support passage of those four pieces of legislation known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. These infamous statutes, unquestionably the biggest blunder of his presidency, were designed to deport or disenfranchise foreign-born residents, mostly Frenchmen, who were disposed to support the Republican party, and to make it a crime to publish “any false,
scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the Government of the United States.” Adams went to his grave claiming that these laws never enjoyed his support, that their chief sponsors were Federalist extremists in the Congress, and that he had signed them grudgingly and reluctantly.
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All this was true enough, but sign them he did, despite his own reservations and against the advice of moderate Federalists like John Marshall. (Even Hamilton, who eventually went along, too, was at best lukewarm and fearful of the precedent set by the Sedition Act.) Abigail, on the other hand, felt no compunctions: “Nothing will have an effect until Congress passes a sedition bill,” she wrote her sister in the spring of 1798, which would then permit “the wrath of the public to fall upon their [the Republican editors’] devoted heads.… In any other country Bache and all his papers would have been seized long ago.” Her love for her husband, and her protective sense as chief guardian of his presidency, pushed her beyond any doubts. She even urged that the Alien Act be used to remove Albert Gallatin, the Swiss-born leader of the Republican party in the House of Representatives. Gallatin, she observed, “that specious, subtle, spare Cassius, that imported foreigner,” was guilty of treasonable behavior by delivering speeches or introducing amendments “that obstruct their cause and prevent their reaching their goals.” Gallatin, along with all the henchmen in the Jefferson camp, should be regarded “as traitors to their country.”
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